


Confessions of a Catfishing YouTuber

by RachelALoewen



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Awkwardness, Catfish - Freeform, DavePBrown - Freeform, DavidBrown, F/M, Jonas Frisk (mentioned), Loneliness, Online Romance, POV First Person, RPF, RoomieOfficial, YouTube, boyinaband - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:41:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22165027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RachelALoewen/pseuds/RachelALoewen
Summary: Have you ever done something you're ashamed of?  Have you ever tried to give it up?Meta-fantasy about Boyinaband from Dave's POV, and a slow burning psychological horror story for all the fangirls out there. Cameo by RoomieOfficial. (Spoiler: it's all his fault).Dave, if you're reading this, please do not ever, ever, EVER actually do this.Love, the fangirls. x
Relationships: David P. Brown (Video Blogging RPF)/Reader
Kudos: 15





	1. I'm not dead but my love life is

It was all pretty innocent when it started. One of my mates was doing it. It was just for a laugh.

Fine, I guess I was looking for content too. A follow up to my fanfic video. It was never supposed to get so... interesting. I know it's not right. I'm terrified someone will out me. So I've decided – I have to stop. I will stop. Really soon. This confession is my commitment contract to make sure I don't go back on my decision.

I'd better start from the beginning. You see, I've always been pretty shy around girls. Especially girls I liked. I was this nerdy kid, into trading cards and video games. I had no idea how to talk to girls, so I kinda just avoided them for years. I was the type of kid who joined a martial arts class just because the girl I liked went. Never asked her out, never even talked to her, just sort of awkwardly hung around her each week. Smooth, yeah? Real frickin' smooth.

Then I started growing my hair and I found my look. Things got better for a bit. Sometimes I would meet a girl I liked, who liked me too. I had a couple of girlfriends. I thought I'd got this dating thing sorted. I guess, for a while, I had. Then my channel blew up.

Once you get to a certain size of audience, you start getting a lot of attention online. Good and bad. You know about the bad - I've made a few videos, and a whole song, about some of the closed-minded homophobic hate I get. Those comments don't bother me much these days. But you also get a lot of positive attention. And then there's the fangirls. I mean that as a non-gendered term, both guys and girls message me. My DMs are full of unsolicited nudes right alongside the less nutty messages saying how much people appreciate my content. It freaks me out. I gave up reading them all, right after Don't Stay in School went viral.

Trouble is, despite the online attention, real world relationships get harder. Just look at the comments any time I collab with someone female. Endless speculation about whether I'm sleeping with them. Including my sister. My bloody sister. I mean, Christ, how stupid do people have to be, right? But whilst the comments section is kicking off, my love life is doing anything but. Either I'm too depressed to leave the house, or I'm busy with an endless cycle of planning, researching, filming, editing, and uploading. And trying to deal with Patreon and YouTube post-adpocalypse, hoping enough cash comes in before my rent is due. There just isn't time to meet someone, and even if I did, there would be no time for a relationship. Very few people want to date someone committed to that kind of lifestyle. Just look at the number of YouTubers who've split up with their partners recently.

Plus, you've got to worry about who is watching, or worse, taking photos. I'm not one of the biggest names, but I can't risk hooking up with someone without explaining she'd better not post anything on social media, unless she wants to get death threats, because everything you do is stalked by a bloody army of horny fangirls. Half of them are underage, most of them are crazy, and all of them have this massively unrealistic impression of me, which I'm supposed to play along with. They just can't understand the concept that I'm a regular person who works hard to create things, and happened to get lucky.

I guess I just got really lonely. And I made some bad decisions. And I am going to stop, soon. I really am.


	2. The idea

So, you remember that video about the fan fiction? Yeah, that's what started it. Or you can blame Joel. It was his idea. Kinda.

We were hanging out with a group of mates at his house. He was spouting off to his friend about how crazy some of the fans are. She didn't believe it, and he was trying to prove it. I should probably mention they had been drinking. It's not like anyone thought it through. It was a spur of the moment thing.

So, they started using her Twitter account to look through his mentions. She started talking to a couple of his followers, and that's when things went pretty far pretty fast. Those fans believed they were speaking to one of their own. They had no idea she actually knew Joel, or that he was reading everything over her shoulder. They opened up about things – well, the kind of things you should never tell a random stranger on the internet. You just don't know who you're talking to.

Joel found this all hilarious. He's messing about, making a game of it, telling his friend to encourage them and see what crazy fantasies they can get the girls to admit to. Talk to them about gnomes, he said. See if anyone's into a three-ways with Jonas. Even though we were having a laugh, I felt pretty uncomfortable. It felt like we were taking advantage of these people, somehow. Strange how quickly you can get over your misgivings when you want to.

So, Joel starts talking about how this would make great content for a video. You could make it into a game, he said. Like that game where you try to make the other person say a word, but you can't say it first. You should do it Dave, he says. You are always beating the fangirls off with a stick. I laughed it off, and we forgot about it.

Except, I that didn't.

The idea stuck with me. It wouldn't go away. Looking back, I think I was craving validation. I know it's a weak excuse.


	3. How it started

A few days later, I created a new email address, and used it to open new Twitter and Facebook accounts. I set up the camera, and started looking for my fans. A couple of likes on posts about myself, and soon I was exchanging DMs asking "what's your favourite picture of Dave?", or "which lyrics do you like the best and why?" It looked weird messaging from an empty account, so I tried to build credibility by posting content using random images I'd downloaded. Most of the fans were female, so I pretended to be a woman living in a large UK city. Eventually, I created a whole persona.

If I'm honest, I think I got addicted to hearing all those flattering things about myself. Or about the person they think I am. It was thrilling to be anonymous, and to re-invent myself as a different character. I felt like an undercover spy, infiltrating this weird online space I didn't belong in. It was like a real life soap opera, but one where I was the main story.

In my defence, I tried to be really careful. I always checked to make sure each girl wasn't too young, and didn't seem too mentally unstable. Yes it was going to be embarrassing, but I didn't want my video to push anyone to the point of hurting themselves.

I told myself I was being supportive. Most of them just seemed a bit lost, going through that difficult transition from teenager to adulthood, and distracting themselves with an online crush. Hell, I've been there. Except my crushes were video game characters instead of real people. I tried to be kind, to encourage them and give them some damn self-confidence so they would stop being doormats for their shitty boyfriends. There was always a shitty boyfriend.

I quickly realised there was no way I could make a video with the content. You've got to understand, these girls are frickin' crazy. Bloody hell, the things they say to each other. It starts off talking about my content, or sharing pictures, but somehow 10 messages in, it always ends up talking about fantasies. Sometimes pretty innocent stuff. Sometimes really explicit. I discouraged it at first, but these girls are damn persistent. There are only so many times you can deflect questions about your favourite fantasy between yourself and your fake Facebook profile until you start making shit up.

It made me feel good about myself. It made me want to be more like the person they thought I was. Someone talented, confident, and attractive. I stopped cringing whenever girls would confide, in detail, about how they wished they could "go over to his house and..."

...well, I guess I don't need to spell it out. Of course if anyone actually turned up on my doorstep, I would freak out and call the bloody police. What sort of person does that? Christ. But this was different. It felt safe. They had no idea who I was, and they were just fantasies, nothing serious.

It's strange isn't it? How you know you would hate something in real life, but somehow you can still fantasise about it at 2am when you're alone in your bedroom with your laptop.

But, the whole thing was an invitation for demonetization. The video would never work. I turned off the camera and deleted the files.


	4. There is no video, what the crap am I doing?

Until that point I actually believed I was doing it for a video.

I mean, I knew I was getting off on it. But I told myself that was irrelevant. That wasn't why I was doing it. I was making a video, and afterwards I would delete the accounts.

Turns out it was more addictive than I thought. Two nights later I was back online. No camera, no plan to make a video, no more excuses. I couldn't stop.

Can you imagine what it was like? To read those private, intimate thoughts written down in black and white? These are real women, some of them crazy hot, who had absolutely no idea the guy they were fantasising about was on the other side of the screen. Sure, some of them would get weird, but if I didn't like what one said, I could just close down that conversation and pick another. I guess I lost sight of the fact I was using them, or that this could be wrong. It was convenient to forget.

Every now and then it would get scary. Someone would talk about plans to visit an event I was going to be at, or someone else would be in contact with people I know in real life. And I would feel threatened. And I would say, God, I have to stop. It's gone too far.

But I didn't stop. It escalated, of course. It always does. It's such a frickin' cliché.

Soon, it wasn't enough just to chat. I started asking for pictures too – pictures of the girls, I mean. I used to think straight women don't send that sort of thing to each other, but damn I was very wrong. It was easy enough to maintain my cover story by finding pictures online to send back. By this stage I had read so many fangirl messages it was easy to mimic them. I found I could maintain a credible story, even when I started asking more and more intrusive questions.

What do you do when the pictures aren't enough?

I started taking risks. One would say "Imagine if Dave was reading our messages" and I'd drop in a hint. "Hey, what if he really was? Imagine he was posing as another fangirl and chatting. What would you do?" The adrenaline spike was unreal.

I started to notice the difference between the girls who were just fantasising, and the girls who were dead serious. The ones who might act on confided information from a likeminded fangirl about Dave's whereabouts. I never gave out my home address, thank God, though I was tempted to do that a few times. Once, I gave out my hotel address and room number, but I panicked and changed hotels before anything happened. I still don't know if she took the train down to find me. I like to think that she did.

I know I won't stop. It's too intoxicating. I know I will delete this confession just like I deleted that video.

So be warned. I am in your safe spaces. I am in your Discord servers. I am in your closed Facebook groups. I am in your WhatsApp groups, on a burner phone that I bought for the purpose. I am enjoying it too much, and I am not going to stop.

Be careful what you tell people online. Because internet friends are sometimes very, very real.


End file.
